This is a great study painting from the UK; a musician playing the trombone sat a park bench on a bright sunny day. It’s a great painting to try several times to build up your skills and your speed. This one is all about getting those colours prepared and onto the wet paper quickly to get a nice faded effect in the background.

It’s a fairly simple painting in terms of colours, using only Quinacridone Gold, Alizarin crimson, Windsor violet and Cobalt Blue. We will start with really bold, golden shades with wet into wet creating a mottled effect for our backdrop. This feels too bright initially, but the colour fades as it soaks into the paper.

Then moving onto the subject itself, we will do more work with wet in wet and some more detailed wet on dry work. This is a fairly simple painting in terms of colours, Quinacridone Gold, Alizarin Crimson, Windsor Violet and Cobalt Blue. We will also use the colour of the paper as part of the background to create the effect of sunlight hitting the walls near the bench.